Posts Tagged The Cure

Fractint and quite simple, using one of these odd colour maps (maybe it’s even its default map, not sure). But it ended up being extremely similar to the theme of the face painting used in the video for the song of the same name by The Cure. Again, seems like a tribute, but it was an accident, one of these that only happens with Fractint. Here’s some screen caps of the video:

Inbetween days - from Tim Pope's site

Inbetween Days video

It’s funny that some of these accidental images are related to The Cure (some of course were kind of inspired by or made while listening to their music as it’s one of my favourite bands), as it seems that Robert Smith himself was kind of the person that actually made me (or… forced me to!) put up a webpage to display my fractals.

When I started making my first images, it was about the same time that they were experimenting with a relatively new technology at the time (1997/98), video broadcastings and video chats. They set up a camera in the studio while recording their latest single at the time, Wrong Number (every other band does this nowadays… so it might not sound as exciting as it was back then), and we used to hang out there and chat with some of them almost every day, and even Robert Smith himself used to appear after the sessions were finished for a brief chat. It was a lot of fun, even with the poor connection I had these days (try a video chat using a 14.4 modem…), it was worth it every minute.

At this same time they had a fractal theme full of Mandelbrots in their official website (unfortunately the Web Archive doesn’t have it saved, it was very nice… maybe some fansite still have it), so I figured Robert was a bit interested in fractals… or at least knew what they were as there is even a song in the Wild Mood Swings album (their last one at that time) that is called “Strange attractions”, that says “strange attractions spread its wings/it varies but the smallest things/you’ll never know how anything will change”… makes all sense if you know fractals, doesn’t it?

So in one of these chats post-recording sessions when Robert popped in for a chat I was thinking about a way to ask him something that wasn’t too much fan-related, as he was just leaving work and probably didn’t want to talk about it… so I just said something like “Robert, you seem to enjoy fractals, I am making a fractal page”… and he promptly asked me “what’s the URL?”… and there wasn’t a page ready yet! It was being prepared and would go online sometime soon, but it wasn’t ready… no need to say that I immediately gave him an URL at Geocities or something that was saved for it and told him to visit it the next day or something because it was “under construction” and the images weren’t all uploaded yet… if it wasn’t for this push, I’d probably never really have started a website with my fractals… and here I am, almost 15 years later writing about it…

About the “Pornography 2” image: it doesn’t have anything to do with actual pornography neither it’s a catch to attract visitors. It was named like that because of this:

The Cure's Pornography cover art, 1982

Hopefully you can get the similarities. You’ll find a bunch of other images that are related to song titles, album names, bands, etc. I’ll be explaining some.

When editing the tags of the galleries almost a year later, I noticed that this gallery also has an image named after a Cure album, “Faith”. It was also inspired by the cover art of this album, which is a pic of Bolton Abbey.